Thinking Hats For Assessment

Thinking Hats For Assessment By Judith Stanbridge and Bridget Spain, Wakari School. Research Question • Can thinking hats be used as a means of assessing the children’s deeper understanding of topic work? Method • The hats have been used as a teaching strategy over a few years. Our study involved New Entrant and Year 2 children. Some of the New Entrant children had only been at school a very short time and therefore has only a brief exposure to the hats. Initial Testing • After our pirate topic we put out the coloured thinking hats for the children to see. • We interviewed each child saying “ I want you to do some thinking. What can you tell me about pirates?” • We recorded each child’s comments on the digital voice recorder. • We recorded the number of hats used and which particular hats were used by each child. • We recorded each child’s comments on the digital voice recorder. Results • After the first test we found that all the children used the white hat with some using the black hat. The average use of hats was 2. The most was 5. This was the same for both groups. • Similar results were obtained after the final test except that the red hat was the second most common hat used. • When we prompted the children to use different hats they were able to make comments using more of the hats.

Initial Hats Data Year 0 name

red

yellow

black

1 2

1

3

white 1

1

1

1

1

1

1

3

1

1

1

1

2

1

1

3

1

1

3

1

1

1

2

1

2

5 1

7

1

8 9 10

blue

1

4

6

green

How many hats used?

1 1

2 1

5

Initial Hats Data Year 2 name

red yellow

black

a b c

white

1

blue

1

1

2

1

1

2

1

2

1

1

2

1

1

4

1

1

4

1

d

green

How many hats used?

e

1

f

1

g

1

1

1

1

4

h

1

1

1

1

4

1

1

1

2

i j

1

k

1

1

1

3

l

1

1

1

3

m

1

1

1

1

1

1

n o

1

1

2

p

1

1

2

1

1

1

3

1

1

1

2

q r

1

1

s t

1

Final Hats Data Year 0 name 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

red

yellow 1 1 1

1 1

black 1 1 1

white 1 1 1

green 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

blue 1

How many hats used? 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 1 2 1

Final Hats Data Year 2 name

red yellow

a

black white 1

b

1

1

c

1

1

d

1

e

1

f

1

g

1

1

1

3

1

3 1

3

1 1

1

2 1

1 1

h i

1

1

1

j

1

1

1

k

1

1

l

1

m

1

n

1

o

1

p q

4 1

3

1

3

1

1

2

1

1

5 3 2

1

2

1

3

1

2

1

1

3

1

1

1

3

1

1

1

1

r

1

s

1

t

green blue

How many hats used?

1

1

4 1

1

1

2

1

1

Conclusions • At this level the children understand what the hats mean but cannot independently express their thoughts using the range of hats. • They can independently recall facts which was what we were trying to move away from in our summative assessments. • They still require prompting to express their deeper thinking about the topic. • The kind of topic will effect hat usage because some topics will elicit more responses from certain hats. Next Steps • We are going to try a more directive use of the thinking hats from ‘Take a moment’ by Kath Murdoch.